Crepuscule With the Dead Science EP

Slender Means Society; 2006

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After a long March of performances with their equally spine-tingling labelmates Parenthetical Girls, the Dead Science will spend much of April 2007 on tour with the Blood Brothers and Celebration, groups so singularly odd that their mere existence (much less their fellow-traveling) might end the debate about how the "disco fad" is homogenizing indie rock. You've almost got to love how unpitchable the Dead Science are, as anyone trying to encapsulate them ends up sounding like an arse: Mutant showtunes for an anarchic codeine cabaret! Murder ballads for a no-wave speakeasy! Prom jams for masochistically patient goths! Grownup, tortured slow-burn music about teenage longing, like a less poppy Twilight Singers or Arab Strap, except taking dissonant turns (via chords that might be considered mistakes by one's old strip-mall guitar tutor) into neighborhoods patrolled by Dominique Leone! Oh yeah, with a vocalist who sounds like PJ Harvey's corpse somehow revived in a nitrous oxide tank, or an emphesemic Hedwig trying to fearfinger a Jimmy Scott fleshlight, or, er, Prince bound and gagged singing through a Miss Piggy costume... So: if the Junior Boys went analog and were sicker fucks?

Crepuscule contains two loping songs from the Frost Giant sessions that would have brought that record's fever down, one of which is a funereal rendition of a composition by the ever-depressed John Dowland-- yes, the lutenist from four hundred years ago whom Sting just revisited for an album. Of the newer material, "Displacer Beast" comes closest to being a manifesto for this trio's ambitions, homaging the classic belligerent, perception-bending hybrid monster from Dungeons & Dragons, and wishing for even more disorienting power: to be "something else forever."

The remaining tracks pivot on sweet shocks, an organ squall here and a sustained howl there, best listened to instead of typed about, lest one be forced to trot out pairs of opposites such as "fluid and impenetrable" or "desiccated and elegant" to describe them. Sam Mickens' lyrics are buried in his of-a-hellish-piece-with-the-music delivery; he may as well distribute burning valentines or print obituaries in inscrutable fonts. Sarah Meadows' three photographs for the packaging are just as slithery: Are the gender-indeterminate people that they depict dead in the woods, or just lying down? Interestingly removed, Crepuscule is by no means a leap back for the Dead Science; it's a sidestep into a shadowy alcove.